SAN JOSE (KCBS) – A federal judge is giving Donald Trump supporters the green light to pursue their lawsuit against the city of San Jose. The plaintiffs accuse the city for not protecting them during a campaign rally last year.

The Trump supporters in this case claim that San Jose police officers intentionally steered them into an angry mob of protesters, following a Trump campaign rally last June. (read more)

Following the Trump administration's recent federal illegal immigration crackdowns, organizers have canceled El Carnaval de Puebla, a major Cinco De Mayo celebration in Philadelphia.

This week, ICE announced that 248 people in Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Virginia are now in federal custody awaiting deportation after a two-week sweep.

And now, NBC reports that the annual parade through South Philadelphia has taken place in late April or early May for the last decade and is the city’s largest Cinco de Mayo celebration. Organizer Edgar Ramirez said as many as 15,000 gather from as far as New England and Chicago.

“The group of six organizers decided to cancel unanimously,” Ramirez said. “Everyone is offended by the actions of ICE. They did not feel comfortable holding the event.”

The decision to cancel El Carnaval, Ramirez said in an interview Friday, was “sad but responsible” in light of the immigration crackdown by federal authorities.

“We have people who travel all the way from Chicago, Connecticut and New York. We don’t want anything to happen to them,” he said.

ICE Officer Khaalid Walls of the agency's Philadelphia office said in an email that "ICE’s enforcement actions are targeted and lead driven. ICE does not conduct sweeps or raids that target aliens indiscriminately."

As for a return of Carnaval, organizers will decide sometime in the future if the parade once again dances its way through the heavily Latino Pennsport neighborhood, Ramirez said. “Let's see how things are next year," he said.

As reported by /pol/’s News Network Twitter account, they just recently discovered that live streams of the US-Mexico border are available via http://blueservo.com/ . The website has become so popular that it has currently exceeded its bandwith at the time of writing this.

/pol/ discovers that they can use webcams to scan the US-Mexico border for illegal immigrants, sending tips to Border Patrol. pic.twitter.com/EaZ52ClXGO

One 4Chan user suggested the Administration turn the live feeds into a “game” for users to help spot and report Illegals crossing, potentially earning points. The two screen shots attached to the original tweet purport to show 4Chan users catching would-be illegals in the act:

Yeah, cut out taxpayer funding and then we will see how many "green" jobs are left.
Mining does not need/get subsidies. It has to show a profit.
Scrapping out worthless wind turbines will bring some cash I'd bet. . .
.

The dinner will be held April 29 at the Washington Hilton.Politico reported that with the White House boycott, the Secret Service will not be providing security for the dinner. It was also reported that entertainment for the dinner has not been announced and that several parties associated with the dinner have been canceled.

Mother Lode Found

Trump donating his first quarter salary of $78,333 to the Park Service – after proposing to slash the Interior Department's budget by $1 billion and battling the parks agency over the size of his inaugural crowd

The White House announced today that President Trump is donating the first quarter of his salary to the National Park Service

Trump had earlier pledged to donate his salary to charity, but decided to award it to the federal agency instead

Interior Department head Ryan Zinke said the funds were going to a fund that maintains the nation's battlefields

The White House counsel presented Trump with a 'range of options,' said Press Secretary Sean Spicer

Interior would sustain a 12 per cent cut of more than $1 billion in the administration's budget

Deep Sixed

The Associated PressWASHINGTON (AP) — Amid the turmoil over staff shake-ups, blocked travel bans and the Russia cloud hanging overhead, President Donald Trump is steadily plugging away at a major piece of his agenda: Undoing Obama.

From abortion to energy to climate change and personal investments, Trump is keeping his promises in methodically overturning regulations and policies adopted when Barack Obama was president.

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

Trump recently failed to fulfill his pledge to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which continues to stand as Obama’s most recognizable domestic policy achievement. Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan couldn’t persuade enough fellow Republicans to back new health care legislation last month. Ryan pulled the measure just before a scheduled House vote.

Trump has had better outcomes in other areas.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Trump signed an executive order last week to deliver on his pledge to unravel Obama’s efforts to curb global warming. The order launched a review of the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s chief effort to curb carbon emissions by restricting greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants. Trump also lifted a 14-month-old halt on new coal leases on federal lands. The Obama administration had imposed a three-year freeze on such leases in January of last year.

The executive order covers a range of other Obama-era rules, including requirements to factor the “social cost” of carbon emissions into all regulatory actions and to crack down on methane emissions at oil and gas wells. Business groups had complained to Trump, himself a businessman, that the rules were intrusive and expensive.

INTERNET PRIVACY

Trump is expected to sign a measure soon to block online privacy regulations the Federal Communications Commission issued during Obama’s final months in office. It’s a first step toward allowing internet providers to sell information about their customers’ browsing habits. The FCC rule was designed to give consumers more control over how companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon share information. Critics complained that the rule would have increased costs, stifled innovation and picked winners and losers among internet companies.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer says the rule represents the type of “federal overreach” that Trump pledged as a candidate to reverse.

ABORTION/FAMILY PLANNING

Trump is expected to sign legislation erasing another Obama rule, one that barred states from withholding federal family planning funds from Planned Parenthood affiliates and other clinics that provide abortions. The rule was finalized shortly before Obama left office in January.

The measure cleared the Senate last week with Vice President Mike Pence, who is also president of the Senate, casting the tie-breaking 51st vote in the 100-member chamber.

KEYSTONE XL OIL PIPELINE

Trump greenlighted the long-delayed project on March 24, reversing Obama’s decision less than 18 months earlier. After Trump invited TransCanada, the Canadian company building the $8 billion pipeline, to resubmit its application, the State Department approved the project, saying it would advance U.S. national interests. Obama had said the project would not.

Approval came nearly a decade after TransCanada applied to complete the 1,700-mile (2,735 kilometers) pipeline to carry oil from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast.

Trump says the project will reduce costs and reliance on foreign oil, and create thousands of jobs. Obama had said it would undercut U.S. credibility in international efforts to tackle climate change.

DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE

Under Obama, the Army Corps of Engineers had declined in December to allow pipeline construction under South Dakota’s Lake Oahe on grounds that alternate routes needed to be considered. Native American tribes had sued to block construction, arguing that the pipeline threatened their water supply and cultural sites.

The project has moved forward again under Trump, who acted shortly after taking office. In February, the Army Corps of Engineers abandoned further study and granted an easement that was needed to complete the pipeline. Energy Transfer Partners immediately began drilling under the lake.

FUEL EFFICIENCY STANDARDS

The Trump administration is re-examining federal requirements governing the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks. In 2012, the Obama administration set fuel economy regulations for model years 2017-2025 and agreed to complete a midterm evaluation by next year. Then, days before Obama left office, the Environmental Protection Agency decided to keep stringent requirements it had set in place for model years 2022-2025.

The auto industry balked. Trump announced in Michigan that he’s putting the midterm review back on track. His decision has no immediate effect but requires the EPA to determine no later than April 2018 whether the 2022-2025 standards are appropriate.

TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP

Obama was his administration’s biggest cheerleader for the sweeping agreement involving the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim nations. But the Senate needed to ratify it, and bipartisan opposition basically doomed it before he left office.

As a candidate, Trump railed against this agreement and pledged to withdraw from it, saying he was a better negotiator and could strike better deals. Shortly after taking office, he directed the U.S. trade representative to withdraw and said he would pursue individual deals with the other countries.

ABORTION/MEXICO CITY POLICY

Trump reinstated a ban on providing federal money to international groups that perform abortions or provide information about them. Obama had lifted the ban when he took office in 2009.

Known as the “Mexico City Policy” or, by critics, as the “global gag rule,” the regulation has been a political volleyball, instituted by Republican administrations and rescinded by Democratic ones since 1984. Trump signed it one day after the 44th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the United States. The policy also prohibits taxpayer funding for groups that lobby to legalize abortion or promote it as a family planning method.

PERSONAL FINANCE

Trump has instructed the Department of Labor to delay an Obama-era rule that would require financial professionals who charge commissions to put their clients’ best interests first when advising them on retirement investments. The “fiduciary rule” was aimed at blocking consultants from steering clients toward investments with higher commissions and fees that can eat away at retirement savings. The rule was to take effect this month. The financial services industry argued that the rule would limit retirees’ investment choices by forcing asset managers to steer them to low-risk options.

Undoing the rule was part of a promised assault by Trump on banking rules enacted after the Great Recession. He has directed the Treasury secretary to review the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial oversight law, which he has said is a disaster. The law’s aim was to keep banks from repeating practices that many blamed for the financial meltdown.

Judicial Watch has released 695 pages of new documents from the IRS that contain admissions by IRS officials that the agency used “inappropriate political labels” to screen the tax-exempt applications of conservative organizations

The documents were produced after a revelation by the IRS that it had located “an additional 6,924 documents of potentially responsive records” relating to a 2015 Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit about the Obama IRS targeting scandal. The FOIA lawsuit seeks records about the IRS’ selection of individuals and organizations for audits based upon applications requesting nonprofit tax status filed by Tea Party and other 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organizations (Judicial Watch v. Internal Revenue Service (No. 1:15-cv-00220)).

Of the 695 pages of documents released by the IRS, 422 (61%) were withheld in their entirety. These newly identified records are not records that were contained in the “Congressional Database,” which the IRS created in 2013 to house records responsive to congressional inquiries into the IRS scandal.

Included among the newly released a material is a June 20, 2013, memo from Karen Schiller, then-Acting Director, EO Rulings and Agreement, suspending use of the controversial Be on the Lookout (BOLO) and Touch and Go (TAG) lists:

Other records reveal that the IRS was going to require 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations to restrict their alleged political activities in exchange for “expedited consideration” of their tax-exempt applications.

The Obama administration was 8 years of scandals. Every agency became a weapon against conservatives.

President of Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton made the following statement:

“No wonder the Obama IRS has been hiding these records. The new smoking-gun documents contain admissions by the Obama IRS that it inappropriately targeted conservative groups, but the records also show that the abuse continued – as the Obama IRS tried to force conservative applicants to give up their First Amendment rights in order to finally get their applications granted.”

During the February 2016 GOP primary debate candidate Trump told the world what he would do in response to continued North Korean missile aggression –SEE HERE– In January of 2017 President Trump repeated the message –SEE HERE–

On April 6th and 7th, last week, President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a two day summit discussing trade and North Korea. The United States and China are the two largest economies in the world. Now see this:

A fleet of North Korean cargo ships is heading home to the port of Nampo, the majority of it fully laden, after China ordered its trading companies to return coal from the isolated country, shipping data shows.

[…] To curb coal traffic between the two countries, China’s customs department issued an official order on April 7 telling trading companies to return their North Korean coal cargoes, said three trading sources with direct knowledge of the order.

[…] Shipping data on Thomson Reuters Eikon, a financial information and analytics platform, shows a dozen cargo ships on their way to North Korea’s main west coast port of Nampo, almost all carrying cargoes from China. (read more)

[…] To make up for the shortfall from North Korea, China has ramped up imports from the United States in an unexpected boon for U.S. President Donald Trump, who has declared he wants to revive his country’s struggling coal sector.

Eikon data shows no U.S. coking coal was exported to China between late 2014 and 2016, but shipments soared to over 400,000 tonnes by late February.

This trend was exacerbated after cyclone Debbie knocked out supplies from the world’s top coking coal region in Australia’s state of Queensland, forcing Chinese steel makers to buy even more U.S. cargoes. (read more)

The FBI arrested Candace Marie Claiborne on March 28. She made her first appearance in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia the following day. She pleaded not guilty and faces a preliminary hearing April 18.

A federal complaint was unsealed charging Candace Marie Claiborne, 60, of Washington, D.C., and an employee of the U.S. Department of State, with obstructing an official proceeding and making false statements to the FBI, both felony offenses, for allegedly concealing numerous contacts that she had over a period of years with foreign intelligence agents.

The charges were announced by Acting Assistant Attorney General Mary B. McCord for National Security, U.S. Attorney Channing D. Phillips of the District of Columbia and Assistant Director in Charge Andrew W. Vale of the FBI’s Washington Field Office.

“Candace Marie Claiborne is a U.S. State Department employee who possesses a Top Secret security clearance and allegedly failed to report her contacts with Chinese foreign intelligence agents who provided her with thousands of dollars of gifts and benefits,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General McCord. “Claiborne used her position and her access to sensitive diplomatic data for personal profit. Pursuing those who imperil our national security for personal gain will remain a key priority of the National Security Division.”

“Candace Claiborne is charged with obstructing an official proceeding and making false statements in connection with her alleged concealment and failure to report her improper connections to foreign contacts along with the tens of thousands of dollars in gifts and benefits they provided,” said U.S. Attorney Phillips. “As a State Department employee with a Top Secret clearance, she received training and briefing about the need for caution and transparency. This case demonstrates that U.S. government employees will be held accountable for failing to honor the trust placed in them when they take on such sensitive assignments”

Claiborne also noted in her journal that she could “Generate 20k in 1 year” working with one of the PRC agents, who, shortly after wiring $2,480 to Claiborne, tasked her with providing internal U.S. Government analyses on a U.S.-Sino Strategic Economic Dialogue that had just concluded.

The Department of Justice website also outline what kind of time Claiborne could be facing with these charges:

The maximum penalty for a person convicted of obstructing an official proceeding is 20 years in prison. The maximum penalty for making false statements to the FBI is five years in prison. The maximum statutory sentence is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes. If convicted of any offense, the sentencing of the defendant will be determined by the court based on the advisory Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

What’s shocking is that the Clinton’s are still walking around freely after the countless laws they have broken. Claiborne being charged is a good start though.

Rep. Roskam: The Obama Administration was very lenient with the crimes that Lois Lerner committed. And those are strong words that I’m using but the House Ways and Means Committee voted out a criminal referral to the Department of Justice which was completely dismissed by the Department of Justice… We think that Lois Lerner did two things wrong. Number one, she denied people due process and equal protection of the law based on their political philosophy. We’re convinced that there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that that’s true. And that’s a felony. Secondly, we suspect that she lied to the Inspecter General of the Treasury Department.

Napolitano claimed President Obama went outside of American chain-of-command, to British intelligence, to spy on Trump!

Judge Andrew Napolitano: “Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. He didn’t use the NSA. He didn’t use the CIA. He didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use Department of Justice. He used GCHQ. What the heck is GCHQ? That’s the initials for the British spying agency. They have 24/7 access to the NSA database. So by simply having two people go to them saying, ‘President Obama needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump, conversations involving president-elect Trump,’ he’s able to get it, and there’s no American fingerprints on this.”

Today we found out — 30 days after Judge Napolitano broke the story — that he was right.CNN reported, via Zero Hedge:

British and other European intelligence agencies intercepted communications between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials and other Russian individuals during the campaign and passed on those communications to their US counterparts, US congressional and law enforcement and US and European intelligence sources tell CNN.

The communications were captured during routine surveillance of Russian officials and other Russians known to western intelligence. British and European intelligence agencies, including GCHQ, the British intelligence agency responsible for communications surveillance, were not proactively targeting members of the Trump team but rather picked up these communications during what’s known as “incidental collection,” these sources tell CNN.

The European intelligence agencies detected multiple communications over several months between the Trump associates and Russian individuals — and passed on that intelligence to the US. The US and Britain are part of the so-called “Five Eyes” agreement (along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand), which calls for open sharing among member nations of a broad range of intelligence.

Mother Lode Found

After a long wait, President has finally presented his budget blueprint “to make America great again”. Let’s analyze its possible impact on the gold market. First, we need to praise a 1.2 percent cut in discretionary spending, on balance. In particular, Trump wants to cut the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent, the budget of the Department of State and USAID by 29 percent, and both the budget of the Department of Labor and the Department of Agriculture by 21 percent. The table below summarizes the proposed changes in the allocation of discretionary budget funds.

Table 1: Trump’s Budget Blueprint (in billions of dollars)

Although discretionary spending makes up only about a quarter of all federal spending, it’s a step in the right direction given the American fiscal deficits and indebtedness. As one can see in the chart below, the current ratio of the U.S. public debt to GDP is unprecedented.

Chart 2: Public debt to GDP from 1966 to 2016.

Hence, we agree that it’s time to redefine the proper role of the Federal Government, which should shrink and get out of an area where it doesn’t belong. Defunding cultural programs – such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – is a good example. Eliminating programs which do not work – as Essential Air Service, a subsidy program for little-used rural airports – is also a praiseworthy idea. Unfortunately, all these cuts are proposed mainly to fund the 10 percent increase in the budget of Department of Defense, since the goal is to rebuild “our nation’s military without adding to our federal deficit”. Because, you know, U.S. military spending is very modest, it’s just the biggest in the world and higher than the next seven biggest military budgets combined.

What is, however, much more important than our disappointment is that members of Congress express skepticism about the budget plan. Interestingly, there are also Republicans among them, as some of them are defense hawks, who claim that the increase in military spending is not enough, while other see the proposed cuts in non-military spending as too radical. Some of the congressmen even claim that the proposal is dead on arrival. Well, it’s not very surprising given the built-in resistance of members of Congress to cuts, particularly those that affect their districts.

To make matters worse, Trump’s military budget proposal is well above the “sequestration” cap. Hence, it needs to get at least 60 votes in the Senate. Since Republicans have only 52 seats, it means that at least 8 Democrats will have to back the plan. The problem is that they will not approve the increase in military budget financed by cuts in domestic non-military spending. If history is any guide, the most likely way to make Democrats agree to higher defense spending is to assure them that domestic spending also increases. It would water down proposed cuts, which means that the U.S. public debt will not decrease. It might be positive for the gold market, but it should not increase it significantly either, given the Republican budget hawks’ efforts to curb the public debt.

However, another aspect of Trump’s budget plan may be much important for the gold market. The proposal not only covers just discretionary spending, but it does not say anything about tax cuts or infrastructure spending. Actually, the plan includes 13 percent cuts to the Department of Transportation.

The details on the complete budget are supposed to be presented mid-May. It means that the promised fiscal stimulus may arrive later than expected. As a reminder, we write about proposals which aroused the animal spirits on Wall Street and ignited a post-election rally. Therefore, the impatience over Trump’s fiscal stimulus is growing, which may hamper the bullish trend in risky assets and strengthen gold, the ultimate safe haven. Although the reflation trade may stay in place, the enthusiasm about the Trump’s economic agenda should decline. As we wrote in the January edition of the Market Overview, “Trump’s proposals would take a lot of time and political negotiation to be implemented and it would take even more time to influence the U.S. corporations’ profits”. Hence, the bumpy road to the implementation of Trump’s proposal and the related uncertainty are an important upside risk for the gold market. You see, Trump managed to boost confidence in the U.S. economy. However, if he does not translate it into real actions and stronger hard data, the market sentiment may reverse, driving risky asset prices down – while supporting gold.

Those numbers tell quite a lot IMO.
At least what it tells me is that lots of people that supported her also support war and bombing.
If he lost part of his base over this, yet his approval rating goes up, the difference had to be made up of those that previously disapproved. Ie: the ones who had been bitchin' and complaining. He finally did something they liked.